If the fediverse is to be adopted by the masses, the onboarding experience needs to change. A new user can't be presented with a choice of instances as part of signing up or at least the process of making the choice needs to dumbed down a lot. I don't know how or if this can be solved, I just know as someone involved in app development and UX that the current experience won't work.

My mother would not know how to handle this paragraph: "Lemmy.world is one node in a network of hundreds of Lemmy instances. Before you sign up here, take a moment to explore all the instances at https://lemmyverse.net/. You may find an instance with a regional or topical emphasis that speaks to you! Don’t worry about being left out; Lemmy instances are interconnected so users from each instance can participate with communities on other instances."

For mass adoption it needs to be so simple that even non-techie older people can get through it without feeling like they might be doing something wrong.

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[–] rako@piefed.social 55 points 7 months ago (17 children)

I think everyone agrees that the fediverse experience is highly different from the centralized experience, but I disagree that the fediverse must necessarily hide what it is and reproduce such a centralized system.

We've been fed the lie that tech is "easy" when it isn't at all, but that is not a problem. Driving a 2 tons box around at hundreds of km/h takes some skill, some time to learn, but we don't consider it too hard and skippable. I think we should put our efforts into simplifying the explanations, showing what it brings and what you lose, if we want more people to join (and I do)

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 7 months ago

Good tech is easy an intuitive. Computers got popular after you could use a mouse and got a gui. Ipods dominated over the competition because of how dumb easy it was to use. Reddit was easy to move to from Digg because it was pretty much a clone in how it worked. Zero learning curve.

Popular tech is almost always easy.

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